Meeting in Bad Harzburg Baths

'Bad Harzburg welcomes Polish war veterans'

The Magdeburg Sting 1936

The Big Cleanup

Autumn, 1936. Stalin, with the help of a new commissar of NKVD; Yezov (Physically, Yezhov was very short in stature - and that, combined with his sadistic personality led to his nickname 'The Poisoned Dwarf' or 'The Bloody Dwarf'), starts a blood bath in the Soviet leadership. The first to pay is ex-commissar of secret police; Jagoda. Jagoda is thrown into the jail. He speaks before torture. The information on "dissidents" leads to internal investigation of NKVD and Red Army officers. All Jagoda men are arrested. Extracted "confessions" lead to more arrests and liquidations. Jagoda is shot.

Previous masters; Kombrigs (NKVD generals) Samuel Szapiro, Siemion Frumin, Lazar Maller, Aron Grodko, Ilya Kitin, Yakub Kazinski, Izrael Pliner, Salamon Milshtein, along with lesser bureaucrats of death, join its victims to fertilize a birch tree covered Russian land. They were creators of Gulag, a network of execution-by-work camps for "nationalists", "land owners", "reactionaries", and "anti-soviets".

27 Mai 1937. Member of Central Committee WKP(b), the head of Kiev military district, komandarm I degree Yona E. Yakir is arrested. The same Yona Yakir who during revolution, at the head of 70 Chinese men, protected Lenin and Trotsky. Soon after, he was at the head of 40,000 Chinese mercenaries "fighting" (torturing and killing) for the revolution. After the arrest, he had writen to Stalin: "I will die with words of love for you". Stalin commented: "A whore". Voroshilov commented the comment: "Very good definition". The "whore" is executed June 11.

June 1937. The wave of political purge reaches the old bolshevik guard and militaries.
2 Marshals of Soviet Union (Michail N. Tuchaczewski, Wasilij Blücher),
6 Army Commanders I class (Iwan P. Bielow, Pawiel Dybienko, Iwan F. Fiedko, Yona E. Yakir, Michail P. Frinowski, Ieronim P. Uborewicz),
2 Army Commissars I class,
2 Navy Commanders I class,
12 Army Commanders II class (Yakow Alksnis, Nikolaj Kaszyrin, Awgust Kork, and others),
2 Navy Commanders II class (Iwan K. Kozanow, Piotr Smirnow-Swietlowski),
15 Army Commissars II class.
plus scores of senior Army officers and thousands of lesser officers will be arrested and executed. 3,000 of senior officials of Jagoda's NKVD are denounced as spies, thieves and embezzlers and then executed. Finally, all seventeen Army Commissars take an exit, followed by twenty-five out of twenty-eight Corps Commissars, and thirty-four out of thirty-six Brigade Commissars and thousands of political officers. The Hydra bitts off its head… or Stalin had a good pretext to get old mentality out of the army, and new blood into the old bolshevik body. They were not innocent victims of soviet secret police; they were soviet secret police members!

Between 1937 and 1938, 143,810 Poles living in the Soviet Union were officially charged with one thing or another as a part of soviet war on national minorities - they were the first to be targeted on purely ethnic grounds. Of these 139,835 were sentenced administratively, that is, without following the usual legal procedures. All told, 111,091 of them were executed. Poles accounted for about 40 percent of the victims of the soviet purges aimed at national minorities. Such abysmal numbers are absolutely staggering to the normal, healthy mind. And every one of these "numbers" had a first and last name and a life - such as it was - before his or her dislocation or "liquidation". But a greater tragedy was yet to follow - during the 1939-41 Soviet occupation of Poland and in the postwar years.

On August 22, 1938, Lavrenty Beria became the deputy to Yezhov and took over the governance of the Commissariat. On March 3, 1939 Yezhov was relieved of all his posts in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. On April 10, 1939 he was arrested. The Soviet judge Ulrikh tried him in Beria's office. In the night of 3/4 February, 1940 he was shot. His ashes were dumped in a common grave at Donskoi Cemetery.

Between July 25 and 27, 1939, with World War II looming only five weeks off, that the Cipher Bureau's chiefs, Lt. Col. Gwido Langer and Major Maksymilian Ciezki, the three civilian mathematician-cryptologists, and Col. Stefan Mayer (Polish General Staff intelligence chief), on General Staff instructions, revealed Poland's Enigma-decryption achievements to intelligence representatives of France; Major Gustave Bertrand, the French radio-intelligence and cryptology chief, and Capt. Henri Braquenié of the French Air Force staff and Britain; Commander Alastair Denniston, chief of Britain's Government Code and Cypher School, Alfred Dillwyn Knox, chief British cryptologist, Commander Humphrey Sandwith, chief of the Royal Navy's intercept and direction-finding stations and Colonel Stewart Menzies, the deputy head of M.I.6.. It was agreed that both delegations, the British and the French, would receive a copy of an "Enigma", build in Poland, together with drawings and plans of the bombs and perforated sheets.

On 16 August, 1939 Captain Bertrand, accompanied by Tom Green from M.I.6 and Commander Wilfred Dunderdale, the British Intelligence resident in Paris, arrived at Victoria Station in London. The "Enigma" was handed to Colonel Menzies, who was anxiously awaiting them. This gift would be Poland's first and the most important contribution to a common victory in WW II. It will become a seed of Bletchley Park effort, which offered England its only military advantage that narrowly prevented British from forcefully learning the Teutonic culture. In exchange, later, at Yalta, British and Americans delivered Poland to Stalin. The official history of the Bletchley Park's project "Ultra", declassified in 1960's, excluded the Polish contribution until 2002. What a miscarriage of truth!

August 23, 1939
Stalin and Hitler finally signed a Soviet-Nazi military pact which sealed the future of Poland. Ribentrop and Molotov sign soviet-german pact.

Canaris, the head of German military intelligence organization, invited to diner, at his house, Capt. Szymanski, the Polish military attaché in Berlin. He informed him about plans Hitler had for invasion of Poland. Szymanski telegraphed Polish HQ, which called general mobilization. England and France, supposedly Polish allies, protested because it will provoke Germany. Poland was forced to call off general mobilization. The Polish Army was in confusion when Germans attacked. The same England and France did nothing to realy help.

Prolog Cavalry Players Trip Meeting Airport Boat ride Castle Visiting Bad Harzburg Epilog Executions Photos The End